Hell yes this is in Hull - Part One

Can you indulge me for a couple of posts please? Can we pretend that I’m not posting a week after Bank Holiday and that instead I am a mere day late? I could be wrong, but just lately I get the feeling that my employers want me to actually work for a living. It’s incredibly inconvenient and has really gotten in the way of my blog posting duties.

So you remember Bank Holiday right? Of course you do, it was a just a day ago.

You might have picked this up by now but I love my Hull. I’m not the only one, all of us Hull citizens (do we have a name?!) are fiercely proud of our mothership. And when I say fiercely proud I mean scarily, up in your grill, proud of it. Don’t be talking shit about our city. Only we’re allowed to do that. I think it comes from being constantly under siege, we have to be proud, we have to believe that we are the greatest because if we believed everything we heard about ourselves we’d all throw ourselves in the Humber and have done with it.

I don’t know why everyone hates us but nobody wants to say anything nice about us. Like, ever. Instead people will say “You’re from Hull did you say? Oh yes don’t you have the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Britain?” “Isn’t Hull the obese capital of Europe?” “Don’t you have the worst schools in the UK?” “Is it true that the streets are so vicious everyone wears stab vests?” “Didn’t you get voted number one when the Crap Towns book was first published?” (Yes. It’s a sore point.)

The main problem appears to be that there is this general impression that Hull is a not very nice place, for whatever reason, which is then perpetuated to the point where it becomes fact. You’ll get people telling you about the city who have never even been there. Bad form, people, bad form.

I am on a one woman mission to promote my city. Yes at times it is a little bit shit but I bloody love it thank you very much and you know what? Some parts of all cities are a little bit shit sometimes.

This Bank Holiday someone came to visit me and I wanted to show Hull at its very best. However with no car and with guinea pig duties pressing heavily on me I felt somewhat at a loss as to where to take them.

Inspiration came in the form of East Park. The house I grew up in backed on to it so I was there most weekends when I was growing up. It’s where I first learnt what a wallaby was. It’s where I got bitten by a goose (horrifying experience). It’s where I played bob-down tig with my Dad only didn’t bob down fast enough, leaving me with a crescent shaped scar on my forehead where his fingernail punctured my skin. Aaah happy days.

The best thing about East Park is that it has it all. Playground? Check. Animals? Check. Grassy areas. Check. Places to climb? Check. Water play area? Check.

It was the rather lucky recipient of a £6 million pot of money from the Heritage Lottery Fund a few years ago for the purposes of redevelopment and it is now a work of art. Whereas I made do with a paddling pool which would be filled up in early July and not emptied until the end of August, children now have a whole trickling river to play in complete with fountains and Archimedes Screw. Whereas I used to vainly stand at the fence, willing an animal, any animal, to come near me, I can now lean over and touch goats and point at guinea pigs and get close to the deer and wallabies.

An albino wallaby! Hello my name is awesome.

The little sweet shop on the corner that was there when I was a wee thing is still there now and you can still get a bag of duck food for 50p and go and sit near the boating lake and get attacked by ducks and geese and pigeons.

(Luckily my life changing experience of being bitten by a goose has not totally traumatised me)

You can wander amidst the gardens and you can now go to a freakin’ cafe which they built with the new money. You can clamber amongst the rocks of Khyber Pass, albeit with a little more health and safety considerations than when I was young. You can climb up some steps and see this view in front of you.

Yes. That is in Hull people.

And even more exciting than any of this is the fact that I’ve discovered that East Park has a free outdoor gym in it! I saw a BBC Breakfast segment about this a long time ago but had no idea where was one here right under my nose. So much fun and I swear, if I lived closer (another misconception is that Hull is small. It’s not. It’s freakin’ massive) I would go here. Exercise bikes, cross trainer type contraptions (which are harder work than the real thing), leg press, chest press machines. All there and available for you to use. For free. Unbelievable. You might have to fight the kids for it however, I did a fair amount of muttering that went something along the lines of “I’m not allowed to play on their swings, why do they get to go on this stuff” but I guess I should be gracious and be pleased that young people are taking an interest in being active. (God I’m such a zen master.)

All this.

For free.

Just call me Hull’s Official Ambassador.

Surrogate Mother

Just in case you were wondering (and obviously you were) I’m done with the guinea pig sitting now. My short spell as surrogate mother to the three furry wonders came to an end on Sunday and I am most relieved to say that we all made it through the experience alive.

Guinea pigs were a new realm for me. I remember wanting one when I was young only to have Mum declare that they were smelly (an accusation I have frequently heard thrown in their direction, I can confirm they do not stink. Or else my nose doesn’t work.) and I couldn’t have one but could have a hamster instead.

And so Bunty entered my life. Yes that’s correct, I named her Bunty after the weekly comic that I would get from the Newsagents next door.

I would love to paint a glorious picture for you of how I’m such a huge animal lover and really I think I am but I hated that hamster. I hated it. She was nippy and bitey and I developed a complete phobia of picking her up in case my hand fell off. My only real pleasure came from cleaning her out and giving her a nice fresh cage, only to be horrified when she messed it up (a problem I also had with the guinea pigs admittedly, can’t they be trained to use a litter box like cats? Do they really just have to crap everywhere?). Smudge and Belinda, our cats at the time, used to sit either side of her cage, watching her swing from her bars like a pirate and there would be just the teeniest, tiniest part of me that would sort of, kind of wonder what would happen if one of them got hold of her.

Bunty finally came to pass 2 long years later. I don’t really know what she died of, we came down one morning and she was lying in her cage sort of rocking/shaking and not long after that she died. I did cry, I’m not a complete heartless beast, and she was even given a full burial service, thanks to the fact that my Dad was tongue and grooving the downstairs toilet and had some spare wood to make a coffin. Bunty still (as far as I know) resides under a tree in the back garden.

I will still linger outside the cages of hamsters at Pets At Home but my favourites are really the guinea pigs, despite the way that they scurry about and try to get away from you when you desperately try to reach into the enclosure to touch them.

I am happy to report that these guinea pigs lived up to all my expectations and more. They are basically a perfect size, not too small that they creep you out but not so big that they scare the hell out of you (I must be the only person on earth to be massively a little bit scared of big rabbits). You can sit them on your lap and they won’t move and are happy to just sit there and be petted, unlike cats which will only tolerate petting for so long. All they’re really interested in is grubbing about and just being guinea pigs. Brilliant.

I have to say however that the whole cleaning out of the cage would begin to wear thing after a while. Much as I like animals I can be a bit of commitment-phobe at times, probably why I like cats so much. Guinea pigs are a commitment, you need to be there to give them their fresh stuff in the morning and change their water bottles and you need to be there at night to clear out any muck and let them have a little run around in their outdoor run. It’s kind of a big responsibility and whilst it was one I was happy to do for one week in the middle of summer, having to do it in the dark and the rain in the depths of winter doesn’t sound as appealing to be honest.

Much as I would like a guinea pig, I don’t think I’m ready for it just yet. I’d rather wait until I was a parent and let my child have one. That way I could pass cleaning and general care responsibilities on to said child and dress it up as a ‘learning experience.’

Wait a minute.

It seems strange that I’ve just said I would rather get a child before a guinea pig. Not living in reality? Me? I don’t think so.

(If you were wondering, Apple is the brown one, Blossom is the white one with evil red eyes and Poppet is the sandy coloured one and, quite frankly, my favourite. How could she not be given this picture...?!)

August Book Review

Don't hate me for being a day late. I'm horrendous aren't I?

Good news is I only read 3 books this month so it'll be a short one. It would have been even shorter if it wasn't for a train journey down to and back from Torquay which gave me a total of 14 hours good reading time. Even better I forgot to take notes like I usually do so I'll be lucky if I can remember anything of them bar the name.

Her Fearful Symmetry - Audrey Niffenegger

I was really looking forward to this, how could I not be given the amazingness that was The Time Traveller's Wife. But I was a little disappointed to be honest.

It took me a long while to get into this one, it was a bit like trying to sprint across the pool in aqua aerobics, I wanted to get to the other side but something just kept holding me back.

Her Fearful Symmetry is about a pair of twins in America who inherit a creepy flat near Highgate Cemetry in London from an Aunt Elspeth that they never met. The only stipulation is that they have to live there for a year and their mother (the Elspeth's twin) isn't allowed to step foot in there.

There is a kind of awkward bloke living in the flat below who used to be Elspeth's lover. There is a kind of awkward bloke living in the flat above who has OCD. None of it really flows very nicely.

Then somewhat bizarrely things take a very strange twist and we enter another realm of ghostly goings on. I shouldn't have been surprised, this woman wrote about time-travelling for goodness sake, but it kind of took me by surprise and I found myself enjoying it. Kind of.

Overall it was okaaaaaaaaaay, but it made me pull a puzzled face. And I found it hard to care about any of the characters which always makes it difficult to feel sympathy for them.

The Rose of Sebastopol - Katherine McMahon

I'm seriously struggling to think about how to write about this book. Which is not a good start.

Drippy heroine. Drippy fiance. Headstrong cousin. Crimean War.

It could have been amazing but it was all a little cliched and I just felt like it didn't go far enough. There were questions which weren't really answered, and not in that very clever, "Oooh I wonder what happened there, let's sit and have a think about it" way, but in an annoying "You couldn't be bothered to explain that properly could you?" way.

I mean I read it. But that's not saying a lot considering I was trapped on a train for 6.5 hours and couldn't be bothered to do any cross stitching.

Blah.

The Weight of Silence - Heather Gudenkauf

Hello The Times/WH Smith book offer, you reel me in again. Good job really considering that I finished the first book on the way down to Torquay and needed something to read on the way back up but man am I pleased that I only spent £2.99 on it.

Two little girls go missing and the story of their absence is told through the voices of the various people connected to them. Totally readable and I raced through it but when it was over I couldn't really work out why I'd read it and what I'd gained from it. I was left going, "Yeah, and?"

It is one of the Book Club's summer reads and I can totally see why. Very easy to read, sucks you in very quickly and as soon as you've read it you can leave it on the beach or at the hotel and never think about it again. I don't mean that as a damning review, more a pat on the back for the people that choose the books for the Book Club, well done them.

...........

The winner this month?

Her Fearful Symmetry.

But it's a bit like picking out the banana that's the least black and mushy out of a bunch.

Not a good month.

One night in Torbaydos a.k.a. The Night I Fell Off the Wagon.

My problem is that I'm not very good at exercising self restraint. The phrases "I'll just have one" or "I'll just have a small bit" just don't seem to appear in my vocabulary. I'm an all or nothing girl. That's why it's just safer to not surround myself with temptation. It's best for me not to buy a multipack of crisps so they last me for the week. Because they won't last me for the week. They'll last for 2 days, maybe 3 if I'm lucky. I can't buy a packet of biscuits without shoving the whole lot in my mouth so it's easier to just not buy biscuits. I had hoped that now I'm eating much more sensibly I would somehow miraculously discover the ability to not plough my way through a massive bag of Sensations in one go but so far that hasn't happened.


The same rule used to apply for alcohol. I'm your classic binge drinker. I will never have just one glass of wine. I'll have 1 case bottle instead. I've never been the kind of person that will go "Ooh I'll have a lovely glass of wine in the bath". Nope. I drank to get drunk. If it wasn't a big night out, that was fine, I just wouldn't drink, I had no interest in just having one glass of wine, I'm not desperate for the taste of alcohol. In some ways this has been useful since going on the warfarin because it's meant that, to be honest, I haven't missed alcohol that much - I only drank once in a Sheffield flood, it just happened that when I drank, I drank.

I've been lucky in that I have a friend who is also a warfarin addict so I've been able to turn to her for advice. I asked her how she coped on big nights out when she was the only one sober and she informed me that she was a bad girl who, on those nights when it was a big occasion, she would just not take her warfarin, have a drink and hope that the alcohol thinned her blood out enough. I was dubious. I am a rule follower after all and the Doctor said I could only have one drink.

But.

I went down to Torquay. I knew that drinking would be involved. And, seeing as my INR has stabilised a little bit in the past month or so (hurray!) I decided that I would try this little bit of trickery out. I would forgo my warfarin, have a few drinks instead of just the one glass of wine and everything would be alright. I did feel a little dubious about it but my cousin assured me that everything would be fine and she is literally the only person I know that can use the phrase "Trust me, I'm a Doctor".

Except I forgot didn't I. I forgot that there was no way I was "just going to have an extra couple of glasses of wine". Because I can't do that.

And so I fell off the wagon.

And let me tell you. When I fall. I fall.

I was like Phil Mitchell getting addicted to crack. I was like a kid in toyshop. I was like a bunch of army lads on leave. I might as well have just asked for a top shelf drink. I managed to consume over one evening:

- gin and tonics
- wine

- margarhitas

- jaegerbombers

- vodka and coke

And I have no idea how many of the above I had.

I'm not proud. It was not big and it was most certainly not clever and my hangover the next day punished me (although I have to confess that I didn't feel more hungover than I would have been on any other big night out, I thought I would be much worse considering this would be the first time I'd had a mental night out since the beginning of May).

But more than that, I felt like crap because I knew that I was drinking for all the wrong reasons. I went back to my old ways of using alcohol as my safety blanket, as my secret confidence booster and I should know better than that, I should be able to handle myself in a group of strangers without being drunk. I've done alright with it so far but this night out was tough - I was surrounded by ridiculously good looking people and if they weren't good looking, they were clever and doing worthwhile jobs. It's bad enough that I was out with a load of Doctors but when the only other person who isn't a Doctor works with a freakin' bomb disposal unit in the army, you can start to feel more than a little pathetic that you do nothing really worthwhile with your life.

Lots of good looking people + lots of talent = levels of self-loathing through the roof

So I drank to care less that I was the fattest person there (and this is after losing 2.5 stone, if I'd been in this situation a few months previously I'd have probably ended the night by throwing myself in the harbour) and I drank to care less that I was having to talk to strangers, and I drank to make myself not care about either of these situations.

And I ended up becoming the person that I don't really like. I was like the person that I've been observing on my nights out when sober - I was too loud and probably obnoxious and my sarcasm levels went absolutely through the roof. My sarcasm can get me in trouble at the best of times but when I'm drunk the opportunities for me to come across as a complete bitch are many.

I won't lie. I had an amazing night. It was hilarious and I wouldn't change it for the world. It was just that afterwards, as the sea wind was blowing my hangover round my head, I realised that I don't want to go back to being that person. I don't want to go on a bender like that again. And I hope that this realisation is enough to finally knock the notion of self restraint in to my head.

I just need to find self-confidence some other way but have no idea how.

Reckon Phil Mitchell will lend me his crack pipe?

(Obviously joking. Don't do drugs kids)

The English Riviera

So I've thought and I've thought and I've decided that I can't write everything that I want to write in one post. So I will do a lovely "oooh look at these nice pictures" post and then tomorrow (hopefully) I'll do a lovely "oooh look at what happens when I decide I'm going to drink again" post.

So I travelled down to Torquay this weekend to see my favourite cousin. I hate that I don't get to see her more often - she's the closest I've got to having a sister. Yes, ok, I do actually have a sister, but she's 13 years older than me and we have very different personalities, whereas me and my cousin are only separated by 15 months or so and are pretty much the same person. All I want to do really is look after her, I worry about her you know. I know she's perfectly capable of looking after herself but there's something about our relationship that brings the protective side of me out.

To be honest if she were any old random on the street I'd kind of want to slap her. Stupidly pretty with a grotesquely amazing figure, blonde, a freakin' Doctor, she can dance, she can cook - seriously, anyone else would be getting a poke in the eye round about now. Instead I am stupidly proud of her and would be quite happy to walk down the street with a sign above my head saying "Hey everyone! This is MY cousin!"

But. She lives at the other end of the universe. Also known as Devon. So I have to content myself with seeing her a couple of times a year instead.

This was my first time down to Torquay in particular and I had high hopes, but the weather gods decided to literally rain on my parade and it sheeted it down most of the weekend. It wasn't just the weather that I had to contend with though, I had to deal with...

Killer seagulls.

Growing up, I thought I knew seagulls pretty well. I saw them occassionally, heard their call, life was good. Until I went down to Exmouth to visit a friend and came across something that bore a striking resemblance to an albatross or pterodactyl on the beach. I don't know what goes on down south but those seagulls are ridiculously massive. And they scare the crap out of me. I'm pretty sturdy, I don't start flapping and screaming when a flock of pigeons flies within 10 feet of me, but these...things...are enough to bring me out in a cold sweat.

And it got worse. Not just normal seagulls - but baby killer seagulls were all over the place. Don't be fooled by their cute grey feathers - they want to peck your eyes out and feast on your flesh.

We did manage to trip to see the sea on Sunday, dragging our ridiculously hungover asses to Babbacombe, and more specifically Oddicombe Beach.

Things you should know about Babbacombe and Oddicombe Beach:

1. There is a crazily steep road down to a car park by the beach. And when I say crazily steep I mean I was surprised there wasn't an Alton Towers rep at the top, taking £35 off you and reminding you to make sure your harness was fastened securely. It was ridiculous. And actually rendered me speechless until the horror was over.

2. The Buccaneer Arms does not serve guacamole with its nachos - despite saying so on the menu - but it does do good cheesy chips and the loveliest lady ever will serve you.

3.There is a lovely funicular railway that will take you all the way down to Oddicombe Beach and it is staffed by the happiest, friendliest people you'll ever meet.

4. You should probably go to Oddicombe Beach soon because the cliff surrounding it is disappearing fast.

5. People are mental and will still go swimming in the sea even when it's raining. Granted it wasn't freezing, but come on people!

6. You can buy the most brilliant tacky tea towels from the souvenir shop for £1.50. Win.

First impressions of Torquay? Pretty damn good. It would be undoubtedly more charming if the sun was shining and if we didn't spend most of the time wishing the throbbing in our heads would subside, but not even the old lady who was walking in front of us and proceeded to wet herself could dampen (pun intended) my spirits.

Babysitting

I need to write a post about my time in the deepest, darkest south a.k.a. Torquay but at the moment I can't even get the words out.

I haven't stopped since I got back up North and that means that my brain hasn't started functioning properly.

The reason that I haven't stopped is that the second I came home I unpacked my suitcase, packed it back up again, went to sleep, got up went to work (where I had the absolute day from hell) and then came to look after some little people.

Three...

...Furry..

...Guinea pigs!

I am taking my duties as guinea-pig surrogate mother very seriously but I will be back soon with a Torquay update. I should warn you not to be disappointed - if you think that it's going to be a post all about a lovely time by the seaside, filled with picturesque pictures then you're going to be mistaken, mainly because I fell off the wagon big time and made a rather epic return to drinking. (And no I wasn't supposed to.) And also because it pissed it down the whole time.

Off on a jolly

I'm going off on a little holiday for a long weekend.


To see this person

We've both had a bit of a time of it lately so it was deemed urgent that we get together immediately for some fun and games.

So I'm travelling all the way to the deepest south to Torquay. I'm such an intrepid explorer, it's most like the furthest anyone from Hull has ever been.

I'm excited about seeing her and catching up and having fun and possibly partaking in a glass or two of wine. But mostly I'm excited about the train journey. Does that sound normal? I get ridiculously giddy about long train rides. I think it's all that time stretched out in front of you where you don't have to do anything. If you had 7 hours free at home you would feel obliged to be doing something or going somewherer or being productive in some way. Not so on a train ride, you are forced to be relaxed and you don't have to do anything you don't want to do.

So my i-pod is loaded up with tunes and podcasts. I have all my stitching stuff at the ready (I was going to crochet but we're currently not on speaking terms at the moment but that's a post for another time). I have the books lined up. I have my little lunch bag with fun things to eat in it. I really can't wait.

I wonder if we'll end up making a 19 year old barman strip down to his pants again...

See you all next week!